A daughter discovers herself while uncovering her father's legendary
past in football.
At the age of thirty, Jael Ealey Richardson travelled with her father --
former CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey -- for the first time to a small town
in southern Ohio for his fortieth high school reunion. Knowing very
little about her father's past, Richardson was searching for the story
behind her father's move from the projects of Portsmouth, Ohio to
Canada's professional football league in the early 1970s. At the
railroad tracks where her father first learned to throw with stones,
Jael begins an unexpected journey into her family's past.
In this engaging father-daughter memoir, Richardson records some of her
father's never-before told stories: his relationship with his absentee
father, memories of his high school and college football victories -
including a winning record that remains unbroken to this day - and his
up-and-down relationship with the woman he would one day marry.
As Richardson begins unravelling the story of her father's life, she
begins to compare her own childhood growing up in Canada, with her
father's US civil rights era upbringing. Along the way, she also
discovers the real reason - despite his athletic accomplishments - her
father was never drafted into the National Football League.
The Stone Thrower is a moving story about race and destiny written by
a daughter looking for answers about her own black history. Using
insightful interviews, archival records and her personal reflections,
Richardson's journey to learn about her father's past leads her to her
own important discoveries about herself, and what it really means to be
black in Canada.
